The Sabbatical Report: On being a citizen of this world

The opportunity to spend 50 nights in London came at a crossroads in my life. I thought it would be a kind of swansong, wrapping up my English research to focus on something closer to home: Australian archives, Australian themes, more easily achievable. That’s not going to happen. 

 

An archive at the end of a gravel driveway in Canberra does not have the same energy as an archive reached by way of the cobblestones of  the ancient Clare Market, and a 150 yard journey passing through five hundred years of history in bricks and stone, and half a million people.

 It is more than 50 years since I left London as a child. I thought it was symbolic to spend one night of Sabbatical here for every year I have been away. It would lay to rest the inexplicable yearning, because whichever side of the world I am on, I ache for the other side. I would be satiated.

I have observed this call of home in others and regarded it as misplaced ethnocentrism, as though something in the old world is intrinsically superior to the new. These, I thought, are the emotions of ungrateful and unsettled people. I am deeply attached to the Australian landscape and the seasons of the place where I live, its ancient culture. But it has taken a lifetime to discover all this. But then, although I don’t believe I am ethnocentric, I love London more now, than ever before. Not satiated.

The Sabbatical Report: Crouching women, trousered sisters and fractured memories

I closed my research on the theatrical agent Richard Warner with his death in 1914, by writing an academic paper that was published, done and dusted. I could not find a marriage for his daughter Miriam, and the most informative records are only released when they are 100 years old. I had originally intended to write a book on all of the Warners and their interminable retinue of relations: actors, agents, comedians, musicians, operatic singers, and some marvellous identities called Principal Boys in the Music Halls - we might think of them as cross-dressers today - but that idea was shelved.

But the whole topic of Warner Brothers came alive again after I met up with cousins in London (2C3R is the term – some of them are 3C4R – indicating how far removed they are from the mainline of my own family tree). Miriam lived on! Family branches tend to research their own interesting character and preserve their legend, which helps the big picture. Meeting  much removed cousins has been such a joy for me....and most informative!

The Sabbatical Report: Fighting friends

A very frank exchange of views: Fighting friends and the making of a productive scholarly culture

 Malinowski is regarded as the father of social anthropology, and he rates among the great thinkers of the 20^th Century (all of whom had complicated Eastern European names).

Malinowski

He is not my research subject, but I cannot ignore him. He was the intellectual son of the Seligmans - they were his benefactors, his mentors, encouragers, and they enabled him to take the first professorial chair in anthropology at the London School of Economics. He needed a wage and they didn’t.

All relationships of beneficence are fraught:  that was the important lesson of colonialism. and it demonstrates how charity disempowers. Entitlement lives alongside resentment, the desire for independence, to do it alone, and an unwillingness to recognise that someone else – parental figures – are enablers. Anyway, Malinowski’s relationship with his doctoral supervisor Dr Charles Gabriel Seligman (known to everyone as Sligs)  and Brenda Seligman, the woman who had the big bank account, was uniquely angst driven. He lived in their house, eat at their table, and he could be their harshest critic.

Early morning rain in Drury Lane

It is 7am and raining in Drury Lane, in the centre of Covent Garden, and the only disturbing sound is the long beeps of a truck reversing into the back of the Irish Pub. I did hear the Irish Pub sending its customers home as I was dozing off last night, but a fifth floor apartment with triple glazing is good insulation against the frantic bustling world of Central London.

Simon Winchester, narrative non-fiction - telling the back-story

Simon Winchester writes the most compelling history. I’ve just listened to two books he produced out of one research project – The Professor and the Madman;  The Meaning of Everything

http://www.simonwinchester.com/  

Both books are about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and they are not his latest work.  Sounds dull? I devoured the stories.  What is compelling about crusty scholarly hermits, mostly male, all old, beavering away on A-is-for Alphabet?  It’s their back stories, the depth of detail, the curious, eccentric, unbelievable intimacies of the tale. No character is without complexity.

 The archival work Winchester undertook would have been mammoth because the OED took decades to evolve and produced millions of scraps of paper from thousands of collaborators throughout the world.  The making of the OED was a long, laborious project that produced something like 15 discrete volumes of the OED – most of us have the little blue version that we had to buy for High School (back in the day…) One of the big problems for the original editors was whether the dictionary would ever make enough money to justify the £40,000 invested in it. Today I’m sure the Oxford University Press is doing nicely -  it’s available online by subscription, and there are many specialist dictionaries, some of which I own, and others that I covet.

The reason I listened to these books is because I have always liked the way Winchester tells history, and I am confident he has millions more readers than the average academic who plods through every dense sentence providing references and attributions and citations ad nauseam. Certainly fiction writers depend on our research for the historical accuracy of their stories, but Winchester captures the spirit of fiction in his facts.

Uncluttering my antiquities into the digital age

I decided to devote this week to digitizing.

 I’m never actually disorganised – I can usually locate a single volume amidst 3000+ books and I know what is in my three filing  cabinets – but in a digital age, is all this paper really necessary? 

Sometimes just the sheer volume of paper is overwhelming, and I revisit notes, trawling through my scratchings  instead of moving on confident that I have already captured some essence.

I have been building a digital system for several years, but not in a sustained way  –  this week I think I crossed the Rubicon. An academic entrenched in the past does not need to live in that forest of paper trails.

I’m not sure who will be interested in reading this blog, because you may not have the massive volume of data to cope with. But uncluttering is becoming an art form – there are personal trainers in the field. While Marie Kondo and the other Japanese experts are dealing with designer wardrobes, I have books, journal articles, notebooks, archival documents such as newspaper clippings, wills, company data, census data, etc…by the ton.  Getting bits of paper organized is worth the effort, and I thank the other bloggers who have helped me on my way.
http://www.elizabethcovart.com/work-flow-organize-research-writing/
 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/41711738 

Gall, Wormwood and the Jewish mother

There may be Jewish Feminists but they do not represent Jewry. Feminism will never cross the Jewish threshold. It is gall and wormwood to the Jewish mother. Percy Cohen  (1904) Jews and feminism, The Westminster Review (October, p462)

The old motherhood statements are probably worth examining. They popped up again after Brexit, when the quantity of a woman’s progeny was touted as a quality for the new PM. I am a bit of an expert on this subject, in fact, by some standards I am a top candidate for British Prime Minister as I am currently bringing up my ninth (and absolutely final child…although I have said that on two previous occasions), That is a lot of kids by any standard.

 Please bear in mind that the majority were accidental, non-biological, and some were shorter term than others, but for most of my adult I have been cooking and cleaning up after 2-5 kids – the current ones are aged 17 and 25 so not children – living in my house.